Cryptographers are fighting back against efforts by spy agencies to secretly weaken the encryption standards designed to keep the Internet secure.
In an open letter posted online Monday, security experts from universities in the United Kingdom and Luxemburg blasted the National Security Agency and its British counterpart GCHQ for what they describe as the âsystematic undermining of cryptographic solutions and standards.â The letter was written in response to a jointly reported scoop by the New York Times, ProPublica, and the Guardian that revealed earlier this month how the NSA and GCHQ were working to break and in some cases covertly subvert common forms of encryption. In at least one case, for instance, the NSA apparently planted vulnerabilities in an encryption standard adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency responsible for recommending cybersecurity standards, presumably so that it could exploit it for spying.